I think it’s fairly obvious with what reddit did to alien blue when they bought it, that they don’t intend for the app to be user friendly or an app that people even like. They simply wanted to monetize it to hell and make it earn them the most $$$. That’s all it’s about with that company.

In case you aren’t aware, Alien Blue was the Apollo back in the day. It was the OG best third party iOS app for Reddit. Reddit bought the app and totally shit on it by removing everything good about it.

[–] bricks@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bingo. The Reddit app wasn’t designed for UX; it was designed as an IAA engine for their ad network. I know we’re tired of the “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” adage, but reading through the Reddit for Business page, you realize that’s what you are:

https://www.redditforbusiness.com

Having lived in that whole gross mobile attribution / AdMob / CPx world for a hot minute, I’m especially appreciative of platforms that don’t all immediately race to the bottom. Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification”. Good times.

[–] melonpunk@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Posted: June 23 https://www.redditforbusiness.com/blog/unlock-ad-targeting-potential

Revamping the ad group creation flow and audience manager tools

Starting this week, we are changing the way you build audiences by refreshing the ad group and audience manager creation flows. We’ve rebuilt these tools from the ground up to create a clean interface that outlines all of the targeting available to you within one flow.

While all the 3rd party API and blackout shit was going down Reddit were busy talking up their rebuilt ad manager tools, not their lack of mod tools or support improvements for their unpaid staff holding up the foundations of the platform.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

Exactly. They didn't even build an app in this ten years, they bought a perfectly good one and utterly fucked it up on the way to not adding any features that some neckbeard in the basement could come up with by himself without access to the backend.

It's astounding how bad they are at developing things. Look at the redesigned desktop site, ffs. It's like someone said "hey, we aren't using up enough space with ads, let's add some extra whitespace to flesh it out.".

[–] melonpunk@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

It's crazy how much they fucked that up. I stopped using Reddit on mobile for a while after. I tried the official app then discovered Apollo, which recaptured the Alien Blue experience.